Lottery Rollover Means Highest Jackpot In Pennsylvania History

PHILADEPHIA (AP) _ Lottery players began queuing up today to buy tickets for next week’s state lottery jackpot, which is projected to top $62 million and will be the second- largest in U.S. history.

″We’ll just be jammed. We were jammed this morning as soon as we opened″ at 6:30 a.m., said June Gerken, who sells tickets for the Super 7 lottery from a balloon shop she operates in Pittsburgh with her husband, Larry.

Despite record sales, no ticket sold for Wednesday’s drawing contained seven winning numbers for the jackpot of at least $42 million.

Lottery officials set next Wednesday’s jackpot at $62 million based on projected ticket sales. The jackpot will be at least that much and could go higher, spokeswoman Terry Murphy said today.

The nation’s highest lottery jackpot of $69.9 million came just last week in Illinois. That jackpot was split among four winning ticket holders after Saturday’s drawing. The previous record, set last fall, was a $61.98 million jackpot split among buyers of three tickets in the California lottery.

The largest single winner was a Florida woman who won $55.16 million in that state’s lottery in September 1988.

In the Pennsylvania lottery’s ″Super 7″ game, players pick seven out of 80 numbers. The lottery then picks 11 numbers, and the winner is anyone whose choices are any seven of the 11 numbers. The odds of winning are calculated at one in 9.6 million.

Sally Carpenter, manager of Dunkin Donuts in Woodlyn, said only a few people have bought tickets this morning for next week’s drawing.

″They seem to all wait to the end, and I don’t know why,″ she said.

″Most people are in shock. They can’t believe it didn’t go last night. They’re all excited. They feel they’ve got another chance,″ said Dorothy DeLuca, who runs the lottery machine at DeLuca’s State News and Variety Store in Erie. ″We have people who don’t know how to play playing.″

Lottery officials braced for a record number of ticket buyers in the coming week and advised buyers to use the computer to pick the numbers, to speed up the sales.

Lottery official Michael Keyser said a record 29,258,972 tickets were sold for Wednesday night’s drawing, exceeding the previous number of 27,662,192 on Oct. 14, 1987, when a Hollidaysburg couple won the previous largest state jackpot of $46 million.